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Why use frontend server (Apache or HAProxy or Nginx)?

Scalability - You can load balance multiple instances of your application behind front end server. This will allow you to handle more volume, and increase stability in the event one of your instances goes down.

Security - Apache, Tomcat, and Glassfish all support SSL, but if you decide to use Apache, most likely thats where you should configure it. If you want additional protection against attacks (DoS, XSS, SQL injection, etc.) you can install the mod_security web application firewall.

Additional Features - Apache has a bunch of nice modules available for URL rewriting, interfacing with other programming languages, authentication, and a ton of other stuff.

Clustering - By using Apache HTTP as a front end you can let Apache HTTP act as a front door to your content to multiple Apache Tomcat instances. If one of your Apache Tomcats fails, Apache HTTP ignores it and your Sysadmin can sleep through the nigh

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How to setup Let's Encrypt for Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04 (including IPv6, HTTP/2 and A+ SLL rating)

There are two modes when you don't want Certbot to edit your configuration:

• Standalone: replaces the webserver to respond to ACME challenges
• Webroot: needs your webserver to serve challenges from a known folder.

Webroot is better because it doesn't need to replace Nginx (to bind to port 80) to renew certificates.

In the following, we're setting up mydomain.com to be served from /var/www/mydomain, and challenges will be served from /var/www/letsencrypt.

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1. screen ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/com.docker.driver.amd64-linux/tty
2. when done use CTRL-A CTRL-\ and then y (for yes) to exit

Alternative method: 

1. docker run -it --privileged --pid=host debian nsenter -t 1 -m -u -n -i sh

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Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real